Posted
by
Soulskill
on Sunday January 19, 2014 @06:19AM
from the bad-behavior dept.

New submitter hymie! writes "Nagios is a commonly used IT tool that monitors computers, networks, and websites. It supports the use of plug-ins, many of which were developed independently by the community. Holger Weiß, formerly of nagios-plugins.org, announced that 'Yesterday, the DNS records [of nagios-plugins.org] were modified to point to web space controlled by Nagios Enterprises instead. This change was done without prior notice. To make things worse, large parts of our web site were copied and are now served (with slight modifications) by Nagios. Again, this was done without contacting us, and without our permission. This means we cannot use the name 'Nagios Plugins' any longer.' Further discussion is available in a Bugzilla thread."

The summary made it sound like a domain registrar just transferred the name without their permission, but that totally is not the case according to the article:

In the past, the domain "nagios-plugins.org" pointed to a server maintained by us, the Nagios Plugins Development Team. The domain itself had been transferred to Nagios Enterprises a few years ago, but we had an agreement that the project would continue to be independently run by the actual plugin maintainers.

So really the company just decided they want control of the server now instead of pointing their domain to a third party. Nonstory.

It will be interesting to see who will provide source for packages used by various distros. Those plugins can be used by other monitoring applications and I guess that new maintainers on the old domain could release version of their plugins that would not work with competition, while at the same time old maintainers probably shouldn't use nagios-plugins for their packages.

This battle was lost years ago when this volunteer organisation gave control of their domain to Nagios Enterprises to avoid trademark issues.

So they've been able to continue in their priviliaged position paying Nagios Enterprises SFA for theses years, until finally some mid-level bureaucrat decided that the money they were getting ($0) from nagios-plugins.org community group doesn't outweigh the brand-risk that they pose, and they brought the website back inhouse.

Wow, I would never have seen that coming!!

Sounds to me like Nagios Enterprises is readying its self for sale.

This is the open source business model. Cisco have been at it for years. Get used to it.

The core Nagios guys pissed off enough people that various forks had appeared (e.g. Icinga, Shinken etc), and the new forks provided an outlet for years of repressed development/feature ideas that were squelched in Nagios as 'not part of the core of what we do'.

And as these other projects gained steam and became more popular, the core Nagios folk realised they had some major catch-up work to do, which (iirc) is where 4.0 came from, and seemed to take a bunch more major contributors on board around then as well.

(But they also had a bit of a kerfuffle a yeear or two back over a similar thing - the project going a bit too far in the direction of comercial control (aka stranglehold)).

Someone had to plug the better open source monitor. Icinga (https://www.icinga.org/) is either a fork from nagios 2 or a rebuilt but either way has config file level compatibility with your nagios configs. A way saner architecture for writing add-ons and a better web ui.

Shitting all over your most supportive users (Score:5, Insightful)
is not a viable long term strategy.

Apple: - What?

I don't think that was apple's strategy specifically. More of a consequence of being so successful. They just don't care. Apple's strategy is to be fashionable and cool rather than functional. Things seem to be on the decline for the fruity company in my estimation. This behavior will help drive them back into obscurity once again.